declares that it is the source of all other activity, "the first internal beginner of voluntary motion." His remark would be absolutely true, were it not for those instances in which it originates action only as the occasional cause, and as the sun may be said to cause the business of the day. While imagination is actually our dominant faculty, it is potentially second to a higher— that of spirit or the pure reason; to which it stands in nearly the same relation that a grand vizier bears to a sultan. It wields the influence which rightfully belongs to the higher power, and which the higher power is in our present condition too weak or too sluggish to wield for itself. Between that power and our lower powers, between spirit and our senses, it stands as a minister between the crown and the commons; and according as it advances the interests of the one or of the other, its influence is good or bad. Shelley has said that imagination is the great instrument of good: he ought to have added that it is also the great instrument of evil. Being the interpreter between sense and spirit, it can either spiritualize the former, or sensualize the latter. It will always raise mere sense above itself, and so far well; but, on the other hand, it may degrade spirit, not indeed by the simple fact of giving it a sensuous expression, for it must do so, yet by giving an expression so grossly sensuous that the spiritual meaning is overlaid, if a sensual is not also added. There is undoubtedly danger of this: in its own place, however,

imagination will always be an helpmeet to that noblest faculty by which we behold spiritual truth; it will give a support that is thankfully received. As we are not satisfied with the heat of a stove, but like to see the face of the fire-a sight that although it cannot make us warmer, will give a livelier sensation of warmth, even so without having power of itself to increase our spiritual knowledge, imagination is able and always endeavours to render it more plain and palpable.

Our knowledge of imagination and of its workings, must depend upon our knowledge of its objects. The faculty and its object are correlatives, each unintelligible, each impossible, without the other. We are therefore driven on to the second law of poetry, the law of harmony.

Before turning to this, however, a few words will not here be misplaced in reference to a question very important as touching the history of art. At what age is the imagination in fullest bloom? In the youth both of men and of races, it is commonly said, whereas there seems to be good ground for the doubt expressed by Samuel Johnson, Dugald Stewart and others, with regard to this wide-spread notion. The notion, indeed,| is not founded on facts, but rather on the want of facts. For all the masterpieces of art, so far as known to us, have been the offspring of an age far removed from infancy, as was the age of Homer, the age of Pericles, the Augustan era, that of Al Mamoun among the Arabians,

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that of Dante in Italy, of Chaucer in England, the date of Leo X., the Elizabethan period in England, the same period in Spain, the time of Louis XIV., and, not to descend later, the days of Queen Anne. Whence, then, has risen the idea? It has arisen in the first place from observing that imagination is by far the powerfullest faculty of youth, that at a more advanced stage it is not relatively so much more powerful than the other faculties, and thence leaping to the conclusion that in the interval it has been weakened. It has really been strengthened, but the other faculties have been strengthened much more, so that there is not the same disproportion as formerly. It has also arisen from finding that the most perfect kind of poesy, the lyrical, begins to flourish earliest, and supposing that to begin with the highest kind is a proof of the highest poetical gift. From which it would follow that the famed Provençal minstrels, who have not left behind them a single great name, are to be placed above him who is supreme in the lower sphere of the drama.

CHAPTER II.

THE LAW OF HARMONY.

THUS far have we arrived in the analysis--that as all pleasure is a concord produced while the mind is in a state of activity, so poetic pleasure is a concord produced while that activity is charged more or less with imagination. The concord therefore will be intensified, imagination having that power. It is the grand harmonist of life; it is the interpreter and peacemaker between mind and matter; it supplies the connecting links between thought and thought; it enters largely into the composition of faith, and, cemented by faith, it forms the pillars and the arches of society. Harmony is its chief end.

Such a concord is of two kinds : it may be imaginary, or it may be only imaginative. An imaginary concord is an agreement between Self and a mental representation of objective reality, as Yarrow yet unvisited was to the mind of Wordsworth. The concord is simply imaginative when our nature harmonizes with reality

itself, something being added, and perhaps also something cancelled by imagination, as when Wordsworth for a summer month gazed upon the sea by Peele Castle, and beheld upon it "the light that never was on sea or land." Imagination enters wholly into the former, into the latter only in part.

Neither of these should be overlooked, and from the stand-point of the poet himself we shall see both. Bacon, however, in his celebrated definition, has taken account only of the former, and indeed from his ресиliar point of view, the latter could hardly be seen. Appearing simply as a reader of poesy, and asking himself what he there found, he said that it is a concord wholly imaginary—“ a creation, submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind." But those thoughts and feelings which are second-hand, which are wholly representative, which are imaginary, to us who get them by reading, are original in the poet's mind, and spring from contact with reality. Nothing need here be said of the former, the imaginary concord, as it is largely illustrated in the common psychological textbooks: we turn to that imaginative agreement wherein the mind is face to face with reality, and the imagination appears only as an helpmeet.

There are two realities with which man is privileged to hold communion, a spiritual and a sensuous, God and Nature. By widely different powers do we behold these realities: the spirit has no eye for the natural,